@vic: What do you think of the noise level of the bot? It seems to me like both "eco" and Carpet Boost mode are louder than the 880, or at least the pitch of the fan has changed compared to before. Now, it sounds comparably loud to a Neato.

It is quieter than the Neato and Botvac (haven't measured DBs) but louder than the 880. What is really cool is that when transitioning from linoleum to Berber carpet the vacuum boost kicks in and there is a familiar sound similar to the Scooba 450.

Sounds like tonight I should dust off my Botvac and run it to remind me what the noise level was! You might be right in that the BotVac is still louder -- the difference is primarily the pitch of the sound. It sounds a lot more like a high speed compressor/impeller, really similar to the Scooba.

As you mentioned, "carpet boost" seems to work like a charm. It really does a good job reacting to transitioning from floor to carpet and back. Seems to pick heavier particles out of my carpets, and the hardwood floor pickup doesn't seem worse than the 880 (though quite honestly the roller design is not great for hard floors to begin with)

Sent the 980 on its maiden voyage into this double-wide home. Left the re-purposed bedroom (Robot-Room) door open so the 980 had access to the room that other robots are not allowed to run in unsupervised.

Below is a picture of the dust bin contents after the first mission. I was surprised to discover a 6 inch length of 22 gauge insulated wire had become part of the dust bin contents. True to what was mentioned by "third_deg" in the 800 CHM discussion. The new design of the CHM allows for unusual debris to be gathered into the dust bin without any issues at all.

980 Dust bin contents

Should also mention that several robots are run in the same environment at least twice a week but based on the dust bin contents you wouldn't think so.

Last edited by vic7767 on September 24th, 2015, 2:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Snooping around a little, the 980 still has the button sequence to enter into the BiTs mode. The issue now is how to find the ASCII text output. There is no SCI 7 pin mini din and possibly no longer supports the Open Interface commands. The search now begins to find the telnet TCP port that may have the BiTs and charging reports that we are all used to.

Too bad about lack a mini-din and possible lack of SCI. It seems like that could have been easy to retain. Maybe a port on the main board replaced the mini-din. Vic7767, you know you want to take that baby apart and find out!

The 980 was taken apart, and discovered that there is COM access via a micro USB port hidden under the top rear right trim that can be popped off for access. Then use your favorite terminal program @ 115200 and you can get info like this:

Nice! Any chance you can post closer-up images of the big chips on the circuit boards? I'm curious what the brains got upgraded to in order to support visual SLAM.

EDIT: There should also be an Eye-FI SD card on there somewhere, which provides the wifi.

EDIT 2: Initial impressions: It seems to say evolutionary approach to adding VSLAM to the design. Most likely there's a dedicated image processing chipset next to the camera, and the main board seems to have a large DSP/MCU and possibly storage or memory or SPI boot flash next to it.